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Friday, 12 October 2018

Fauna Timbre - Altering Echoes EP

Labels: Red Orchard Records

Formats: CD/Digital

Release Date: 31 Oct 2018

Tracklist:

1. Heart Murmurs

2. Violent Waves

3. Turn The Sun

4. Umbra

5. Memory Leak

As another Friday evening rolls around it's time to start thinking about becoming more consistently productive (from a writing point of view anyway), which is why I'm committing to writing at least 3-4 times (and hopefully more) from now. I need to for my own sanity and for the love if it. Tonight I'm focusing on new Norwegian doom band Fauna Timbre. The band started in 2016 as a duo, but are due to release their debut EP at the end of this month, as a trio.

Fauna Timbre’s take on doom rock is cleaner than most. The opening song Heart Murmurs is melodic and mournful, but it never becomes truly heavy. The vocals feature that ever so slight hint of autotune, while the instrumentation is sensitively delivered so it doesn’t take too much of limelight from them. The layered and progressive nature of Faun Timbre is really endearing as the slow march of Violent Waves takes over. They’ve been compared to the mighty Katatonia and I suppose that’s an adequate comparison given the clean nature of their sound. They are very good at what they do on here and they do add more crunching riffs to the song, but that level of name dropping only adds to the expectation. The abrupt end to Violent Waves is clearly inspired by the title itself.

Turn The Sun is the most expansive song on “Altering Echoes” and it’s at this point that Fauna Timbre’s sound begins to truly click. They’re dreamy composition style really comes through and whisks you off to a completely different place with almost no effort. The melody is back with Umbra, which is a minimal number to begin with. It’s a flowing ballad but it features bass lines that could easily be mistaken for harsh vocals at times. EP closer Memory Leak is the psychedelic piece that Fauna Timbre’s been threatening to deliver throughout and while that may not be exactly the sound they’re going for here, it works thanks to some great guitar/bass effects. It’s also the longest song on “Altering Echoes” and at times it becomes ambient, avant-garde and subtly jazz-like. Less doom-like then and more alternative, but it works extremely well as a whole and shows that this trio aren’t afraid to experiment. There’s lots of promise within these five songs.